Even if your organization excels at collecting and organizing large amounts of data, that doesn’t mean you’re taking proper advantage of it. Let’s talk about what it means to gain insight from big data. We’ll help you uncover how you can define and extract information from big data in a meaningful way. We’ll also show you why our document management system comes in handy.

Why Data Collection Is Not Enough

Using a paperless document management system for your company means that you don’t need to move to bigger offices because you ran out of room for your filing cabinets. Collecting large amounts of data is easy because it doesn’t take up any room. But it’s not enough to collect data without a purpose.

Your corporation probably keeps a lot of different records. After all, you collect data every time you make a sale, every time you ship a product, and every time your company creates a proposal for a client. There’s nothing wrong with storing these records, but to gain insight from the information you have, you need to do more.

Go on a Targeted Journey

In theory, you could spend some time analyzing the information you have and find some gems. It’s more likely that you’ll spend hours plugging through the numbers without getting any measurable results. That’s why it might be a better idea to have an end goal in mind before you visualize the information you have and look for patterns.

Visualize Your Information

While you and your employees may love looking at numbers, sometimes it helps to visualize the information. Whether you use pie charts or graphs or something else, try to analyze the data you have in different ways.

It’s a good idea to make comparisons to really understand what’s going on. For example, you can compare data with prior year information or with numbers from different locations. Whatever you need to do to visualize what’s going on is fine.

You can also scale down your data to understand what’s going on. After all, it’s hard to process a 20% signup rate when you have thousands of customers. But when you look at it from a different angle, you may see that 8 out of 10 people don’t sign up. This gives you the opportunity to ask why and whether there is anything you can do about it. You might already have the answer in your collection of data.

Examine Your Patterns

When you’re dealing with big data, it’s difficult to break things down to an individual level. But one thing you can do is to examine the patterns. Whenever you notice a pattern, you should take note of any implications that arise from it. It’s entirely possible that a lot of different notes about your data will help you gain some big insight.

Give Your Employees Access to the Data

When it comes to analyzing and interpreting data, you might need data analysts to perform a miracle. But sometimes insights come from the most surprising places. If it’s possible, you should share the information with your employees. While they may not need to know what’s going on at the organizational level, they may still have suggestions on how to improve the customer experience.

Another reason to give employee access to the data is for them to use it to get things done better, more quickly, or more efficiently. If collecting and sharing data can improve workspace efficiency, then that’s great.

Look for Real-time Insights

The most difficult part for organizations is to analyze the data they have and gain insights in time to benefit from them. The great news is that the processes are already in place for that. Your document management system gives you real-time access to all of the information you need.

You Can Gain Insights from Small Data

While there is some benefit to collecting big data inside your file manager, you can gain insights from small amounts of data, too. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to collect and analyze customer feedback. Lots of customers might have similar feelings about your company, but not all of them will take the time to let you know.

Use Document Management to Share the Information

Whether you’re in the process of assimilating the data you have or using the insights to make a difference for your company, it’s important to share the information inside your organization. Document management is a great way to accomplish that.

Every employee can access the documents you need them to see, but you can also update their workflows to include new strategies or ideas. In fact, you can even use document management to experiment with different ideas to find out what works best, by testing new workflows on some of your employees.

To learn more about eFileCabinet’s document management system and how it works, fill out the form on this page for your free 15-minute demo.